Transcript
Speaker: This is HSBC Global Viewpoint, your window into the thinking, trends and issues shaping global banking and markets.
Speaker: Join us as we hear from industry leaders and HSBC experts on the latest insights and opportunities for your business.
Speaker: A heads up to our listeners that this episode has been recorded remotely, therefore the sound quality may vary.
Speaker: Thank you for listening.
Speaker: Welcome to TMI's TreasuryCast and HSBC's Cyboss Spotlight.
Speaker: I'm Eleanor Hill, Editor of TMI, and I'm delighted to be working with HSBC to bring you an in-depth look at the events from this year's Cyboss.
Speaker: Throughout this series, we will explore the critical topics on the Cyboss 2021 agenda that will shape our industry in the next decade, including sustainability, digital acceleration, and technological innovation.
Speaker: We will also examine the opportunities and challenges in the areas of payments, securities, cash management and trade.
Speaker: With that in mind, I'm delighted to be joined in the studio today by Mark Williamson, Global Head of FX Everywhere, Partnerships and Propositions, HSBC, and James Pomeroy, Global Economist, also from HSBC.
Speaker: And they will talk us through the hot topic of central bank digital currencies, otherwise known as CBDCs.
Speaker: So Mark, CBDCs have really come into the spotlight in 2021, and they're certainly a key topic on this year's Cybos agenda.
Speaker: But there appears to be maybe a little bit of confusion or misinformation around cryptocurrencies, stable coins and CBDCs.
Speaker: So I'm wondering, can you set the record straight for us?
Speaker: What's the difference between them?
Speaker: Well, firstly, thank you very much, Eleanor.
Speaker: Pleased to join this podcast and help demystify the wonderful world of central bank digital currencies.
Speaker: I think it's, first of all, it's important to ensure that we're talking the right sort of language and definitions around these different digital currencies and assets.
Speaker: And the way that we'd like to look at it is looking at the digitization of the currency supply chain.
Speaker: And within that, we're looking at what are the key design factors for the $18 trillion per day payments in FX market.
Speaker: And when you're looking at that, there's a few different design factors that we would expect.
Speaker: First of all, there's settlement finality.
Speaker: And then secondly, there is whether it's a digitally native format, token or account based form of a store of value.
Speaker: And then looking at regulated monies and liabilities.
Speaker: And when we're looking at the store of value that's on DLT or blockchain, as a lot of these assets are starting to move towards, then we're looking at whether these forms of payment or stores of value are fungible, durable, portable, recognizable and stable.
Speaker: So with that as a bit of a background, then there's different forms of money that we're looking at.
Speaker: And so the way that we like to frame it is whether they're account-based and regulated and looking at the liabilities and assets and the risk associated with that.
Speaker: So then if we look at central bank money as the first form of money that is being talked about today, then you look at the liability of that, and that liability is often against the sovereign nation state and is backed by reserves and it's seen as risk-free.
Speaker: And central bank digital currencies is looking at how we can digitize that central bank monies through the currency supply chain.
Speaker: Then you look at commercial bank money, and that commercial bank money is the liabilities against the commercial bank.
Speaker: And they're often backed by assets on the balance sheet and is all part of fractional banking.
Speaker: We started to see in the last few years, the forms of e-money, and that's often distributed via fintech.
Speaker: So that's where you move money from your
Speaker: commercial bank into a digital wallet, and then you spend those monies on the platforms that they offer.
Speaker: And examples of that, forms of payment like Alipay, Apple Pay, et cetera.
Speaker: That's where you're putting money from your commercial bank into those digital wallets.
Speaker: And what we've started to see in the last few years is the form of token-based and quasi-regulated forms of money.
Speaker: So the first ones that we're starting to see more and more are stable coins.
Speaker: And the examples of that is US dollar coin and Tether.
Speaker: And they often spoke about Facebook coin and Libra, which is yet to be launched.
Speaker: And the liability there is against the issuer.
Speaker: So there's a lot of debates around who the issuer of those different stable coins are.
Speaker: And they are backed against and pegged against
Speaker: Segregated liquid assets held in custody and you've probably seen a lot of discussions around the fungibility of those assets and therefore.
Speaker: The risk and volatility is medium against those.
Speaker: And then, finally, we've got the often spoke about cryptocurrencies and the important point here to note is that there's no liability and there's intangible assets so there's an intrinsic value against those.
Speaker: And so that's the way that we look at this broader ecosystem and where central bank digital currencies form part of that ecosystem.
Speaker: Excellent, Mark.
Speaker: A super little round up there for us.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: James, anything that you wanted to add?
Speaker: Firstly, thank you very much for having me.
Speaker: But I would quickly add in terms of the way we're thinking about it in terms of means of payment, we're a little skeptical of how broadly a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin could become a widely used means of payment because one, it can't process too many transactions, but it's also very volatile.
Speaker: So even if you could get a cryptocurrency that was able to be used theoretically for a lot of payments, that volatility deters people from using them.
Speaker: So then you think, OK, how do we get rid of that volatility?
Speaker: Well, we get rid of that volatility of a stablecoin.
Speaker: But then, as Mark's just said, then you've got a sort of a credit risk against the issuer.
Speaker: So then you think, well, do I want to use these a lot because there's a credit risk attached to it that wouldn't be attached to my normal forms of digital money that I use every day?
Speaker: So then you think, well, how do I get rid of that?
Speaker: Well, I get it backed by the central bank.
Speaker: That's essentially where you get to have a central bank digital currency.
Speaker: So as you sort of move your sort of journey through these different means of digital money, actually you end up with one where the central bank digital currency comes out, we think at least the best option and will probably become the dominant one at some point in the future.
Speaker: But that timeline is still very much up in the air.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: That makes sense.
Speaker: And on that note around timelines and where we're progressing with everything, James,
Speaker: Where are we in terms of CBDC development and the pilot schemes that are ongoing?
Speaker: Which of the central banks are out in front?
Speaker: It's really, really diverse across the world.
Speaker: You've got two central banks, for me, of the bigger central banks in the world that are leading the way by some stretch.
Speaker: And they're the two that started their pilots and their research a long, long time ago.
Speaker: And they're China's PBOC and Sweden's Riksbank.
Speaker: And both of these central banks have started looking at this for completely different reasons.
Speaker: In Sweden, it's because cash is hardly used.
Speaker: I don't know if you've ever been to Stockholm, but if you have, you probably haven't seen a Swedish Krona note.
Speaker: I'm not sure many people have.
Speaker: But then you start to think, OK, we need to provide as a central bank a universally accepted and accessible means of payment.
Speaker: If people don't want to use cash, we need to provide a digital alternative that everyone has access to that is universally accepted.
Speaker: So that started Swedish Riksbank down this road many years ago.
Speaker: And in China, with a lot of payments going through the likes of Alipay, there's some concern from the authorities there about what that means in terms of financial stability.
Speaker: So the approach there is to provide a means of payment that is backed by the central bank that's widely used.
Speaker: So those two are quite a way clear in terms of the bigger central banks in the world.
Speaker: What we are seeing more and more so across the world is a lot of smaller emerging markets, central banks start to take this quite seriously because the benefits you can get from a central bank digital currency in terms of increased financial inclusion, cutting the cost of payments, greater security, greater financial stability, possibly adding monetary and fiscal policy tools as well, all very, very appealing.
Speaker: So some of the most sort of fast progressing central banks in the world in small countries in Latin America, Latin
Speaker: Ecuador, Uruguay, the Bahamas is the only place in the world to have a live central bank digital currency.
Speaker: You've seen pilots in Ukraine, in Cambodia.
Speaker: These are not sort of the forefront of global central banking, but when it comes to central bank digital currencies, these guys are leading the way because they've got the incentives.
Speaker: Whereas in the developed world, if you look at the ECB or the Bank of England, everyone gets very excited when there's a discussion about, oh, they've started a task force.
Speaker: It's like, guys, these other central banks were four years ahead of you in terms of starting a task force.
Speaker: The Fed hasn't even done that yet.
Speaker: So it's very much that the emerging world is leading the developed world.
Speaker: The only developed market central bank who's anywhere close to what's happening in the emerging world is in Sweden.
Speaker: And the rest of the developed world is still a long, long way behind.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And with those of us that are lagging behind with our task forces, what do you think are the sort of biggest challenges or decisions that are going on behind the scenes there in terms of designing and rolling out the CBDCs?
Speaker: There's so many.
Speaker: There's so many challenges.
Speaker: And this is why it's going to take so long.
Speaker: I think every central bank in the world is going to have a different answer to every question that's posed.
Speaker: And everyone's going to have to do their own work to come to that.
Speaker: There may be an element of
Speaker: Now, what gets adopted in Sweden becomes very, very similar to what gets adopted in other developed markets.
Speaker: What's used in China may be used elsewhere, but it's not necessarily going to be the case because different central banks are doing this for different reasons.
Speaker: But firstly, you need to think what sort of setup are you going to have?
Speaker: And that involves, do you want it to be direct or indirect?
Speaker: Do you want to go direct to people or do you want to go via the banking system?
Speaker: Well, pretty much every pilot and piece of research so far
Speaker: says that going direct is very, very dangerous.
Speaker: You create a huge amount of financial stability risk by possibility of bank runs.
Speaker: It could artificially raise interest rates in the economy, all these big problems.
Speaker: The central banks don't want to get involved in.
Speaker: They also don't want to be in the game of opening people's accounts for them.
Speaker: This is not their skill set.
Speaker: They've never done this before.
Speaker: You've got a commercial banking system that does this very, very well.
Speaker: Let them do it.
Speaker: So it seems like indirect will win.
Speaker: Then you've got to think about the technology.
Speaker: Do you even use
Speaker: DLT tech, do you use, what would you use?
Speaker: That doesn't need to be using these newer forms of technology at all.
Speaker: And that's a big decision that's got to be made.
Speaker: You've also got to think about the design in terms of whether it's a token or an account-based system.
Speaker: You've got to think about whether it's wholesale, how you think about overseas payments, all of these different things central banks have got to think about.
Speaker: And then when you've done all of that, you've then got to think about what is it going to actually do?
Speaker: Do you actually want this thing to be anonymous?
Speaker: And there's a whole spectrum
Speaker: that you can think about right the way from to the central bank and possibly the government, knowing every single transaction you've done in intricate detail.
Speaker: There is a possibility further down the line you might be able to get the technology that allows you to do that.
Speaker: Do you want that or do you want it to be purely anonymous?
Speaker: And different central banks will have different views of how beneficial one is or the other.
Speaker: And populations across the world will have different views of how willing they are to have that level of detail of all their transactions given away to the authorities.
Speaker: There's no right or wrong answer.
Speaker: Everyone's got to make a decision.
Speaker: And then you've got to decide about interest rates.
Speaker: I think that's the other interesting one.
Speaker: Do you want this central bank digital currency to be non-interest bearing and be just like cash?
Speaker: There's a very, very strong argument for doing that because you're almost replacing cash from a digital form.
Speaker: So maybe that makes sense.
Speaker: But actually, then do you want deeply negative interest rates or the possibility to put them in?
Speaker: So you could have an interest rate attached to essentially digital cash could mean deeper negative rates further down the line that may not be necessarily used, but it could give you that choice.
Speaker: Or you could have a tiered interest rate system where you could essentially say to people, well, if you've got a balance above or below a certain amount, you pay a different interest rate.
Speaker: You could essentially discourage excessive saving or however you
Speaker: choose to do it.
Speaker: So there's a whole load of choices you've got to make, as well as in terms of limits you have on the amount you can store in the account, whether the transactions are done 24-7, all of these things.
Speaker: There's a whole load of decisions to be made.
Speaker: And I'm not sure that there's a sort of a universally accepted sort of set of decisions that central banks are coming to at the moment.
Speaker: And that's, again, is why this is going to take so long, because every central bank has got to go through each of those decisions, do their work and try and come up with a conclusion.
Speaker: Anna Whiting Sorrell- Mark let's come to this from the treasurer's or CFOs perspective there's definitely concerns around CBDCs in fact ties back to some of what James said there.
Speaker: Anna Whiting Sorrell- Things like governance, the privacy anonymity side of things and then also we're hearing quite a bit about ESG just wondering if we can sort of take those concerns and have a look at how those might be allayed.
Speaker: Yeah, I think James has set the scene very well in that if you're a treasurer and as a large universal bank, what we need to think about is how do we transition to wholesale, retail, account-based, token-based CBDC that is going to operate domestically and cross-border and potentially through an indirect model.
Speaker: And ultimately, that's going to mean changes or emergence of new tradable assets and competitors, changes to risk,
Speaker: liquidity, operations and technology.
Speaker: And alongside of that, we're going to have changing regulations, monetary policy and geopolitical landscape.
Speaker: So we've got this really difficult Rubik's cube that we need to solve.
Speaker: And then if you look at HSBC, we're present in 64 different countries.
Speaker: So then you've got to think about, well, how do we migrate from heritage to digital with all these different components that we have?
Speaker: And then you think about, well, what does that mean for our finance and risk systems?
Speaker: How do we get them into our finance and risk systems?
Speaker: And so we've heard talk about new currency codes being implemented.
Speaker: So I don't know if any of you guys have been around when we're implementing Euro, but the amount of systems, finance and risk systems that had to be updated in order to allow Euros into the system.
Speaker: If you're doing that times 64, that's going to be a major undertaking from the finance industry and also our clients.
Speaker: So there's a huge amount of different considerations when looking to onboard these central bank digital currencies.
Speaker: And then from a governance perspective, as James alluded to, we've got the worst egg and spoon race going on here.
Speaker: In that, we've got all these different central banks that are looking to experiment and see how they can bring these different central bank digital currencies into their economies and where they're working out which one's going to go first.
Speaker: How are we going to experiment?
Speaker: How are we going to be part of that journey in the indirect model where commercial banks are going to be distributing
Speaker: Central bank digital currencies to our clients.
Speaker: How is that going to work?
Speaker: And therefore, you start thinking about the governance around that.
Speaker: And there's some really excellent papers from the BIS.
Speaker: And they're looking at different models and looking at, do we need to have a financial market infrastructure that sits in between and acts as a traffic top?
Speaker: to ensure that we've got the right sort of standards, the right rule book, the right technologies, because as James said, again, there's gonna be a hybrid infrastructure of DLT and traditional heritage infrastructure that we'll need to integrate into.
Speaker: So it's gonna be a massive, massive challenge.
Speaker: And then we're probably gonna have different levels of privacy and anonymity that's going to be associated with these different central bank digital currencies.
Speaker: We could see that the privacy between
Speaker: commercial banks and central banks, given the trust and the licenses that we have with the 64 different central banks is going to be strong, but the anonymity as it goes out into retail is going to be different.
Speaker: So you're probably going to have these two different types of central bank digital currencies.
Speaker: And again, the decisions around how you implement and what technologies use in relation to bringing these central bank digital currencies into the broader ecosystem
Speaker: will determine the design decisions that you make and the technologies that you use.
Speaker: So it's likely to be a private sort of TLT between wholesale and or commercial banks and central banks.
Speaker: But then how that works as it goes into retail, there's some really interesting design decisions to be made there.
Speaker: So it may not be the traditional proof of work distributed ledger technology that we're looking at today.
Speaker: It may be some of these newer technologies.
Speaker: in the time that it takes to bring central bank digital currencies into the marketplace, where we're looking at proof of stake.
Speaker: And that could introduce a whole bunch of new interesting opportunities and threats for the marketplace.
Speaker: James, I just wanted to ask you about one of the other things that is on Treasurer's minds when we speak about CBDCs, which is obviously the impact on the economy and policymaking.
Speaker: So I'm wondering if you could just give us a little overview of the major points to be aware of here.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: First of all, I think they're good news for economic prosperity.
Speaker: It may sound really simple, but you're taking out wastage from the system.
Speaker: If you can have payments going through your economy far more cheaply and quickly and more securely than currently, well, that's good news.
Speaker: If you think about how much this cost of digital transactions are in the average economy, there's some estimates that suggest it's up to half a percentage point of GDP.
Speaker: just save that overnight.
Speaker: I think that's extremely powerful.
Speaker: And those numbers could be much bigger in the emerging world as well, because if this acts as a catalyst for financial inclusion, if you really crush the cost of payments in some of these emerging markets, this could be pretty transformative in terms of the way we think about economic growth in many emerging markets.
Speaker: I'm pretty optimistic.
Speaker: in that sense.
Speaker: Then in terms of policy, there's a big decision to be made in terms of the interest rate side of things in terms of monetary policy.
Speaker: Essentially, do central banks want this to be a monetary policy tool or not?
Speaker: I think if you were opt to design a CVDC to be non-interest bearing, you are essentially throwing away negative interest rates as a policy tool.
Speaker: I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but
Speaker: it at least would be a decision that you've almost implicitly made.
Speaker: Because if you had a, you could have a non-interest bearing CBDC and you could have a limit on the amount you could hold of it and therefore you could have negative policy rates still.
Speaker: But in most cases, it'd be very, very hard to do that or harder to do that than it is today.
Speaker: So you could see a situation where negative rates are not really used.
Speaker: But then you equally could have a situation where the opposite is the case.
Speaker: where you have sort of an interest-bearing central bank digital currency that allows you to have deeply negative interest rates much more easily maybe than it does today.
Speaker: So these are all things you've got to consider.
Speaker: That decision over whether it's interest-bearing or not is quite crucial in terms of the implication for interest rates.
Speaker: And finally, there's a big angle that could come from essentially the programmability of a central bank digital currency.
Speaker: If you start thinking about how you could set this up to be, think about some of the payments that people have had in the course of this pandemic.
Speaker: And you see the idea that, okay, everyone gets a hundred dollars or a hundred pounds, but you can only spend that money at the supermarket and only on certain items.
Speaker: And if you can code it to do that, the way that we think about handouts and
Speaker: universal basic income and these sorts of policies become so much more palatable because you know exactly where the money's going.
Speaker: It's much more sensible.
Speaker: Some people are opposed to this because as Andy Haldane, I think it was who said, the problem is that you get people who
Speaker: don't like the idea that you can say don't spend money on sweets there's a lot of people who are very anti you know i could program my kids pocket money so they can't buy sweets or you can't buy a hamburger because you're currently overweight or these sorts of things theoretically quite nice but i'm not sure that that people really like the idea of that control but it's much easier to think about it in terms of additional money this is what you can use it for rather than controlling the money you've already got
Speaker: in your pockets.
Speaker: One final thing on the policy side as well is that if you do have central banks or governments who have a lot of knowledge about the economy that comes from the data that are attached to those central banked-based currencies, all comes down to that anonymity question.
Speaker: If you get all that data, actually you can make better policy choices.
Speaker: If you can see that certain sectors of the economy are booming or struggling or whatever,
Speaker: You can set policy in real time far more effectively, far more quickly than we can based on the data we've got today.
Speaker: And I think that could be a really powerful policy tool too.
Speaker: So I'm quite excited about central bank digital currencies as an economist.
Speaker: I think they're more likely to be a force for good than bad.
Speaker: And either way you cut it, I think should be pretty supportive of giving a nice kick to economic growth in the coming years.
Speaker: But say when that is, who knows?
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: We shall see.
Speaker: We shall see.
Speaker: Mark, I just wanted to come back to the point that you made around that transition from the heritage to this digital world of CBDCs.
Speaker: And just wondering if you can give us a little bit more of a flavour about how treasurers can prepare for this in terms of systems, workflows, policies.
Speaker: What should they be looking at?
Speaker: Well, it's going to be an interesting journey as we move from heritage to digital.
Speaker: And I think just picking up on and echoing some of the points that James made.
Speaker: But treasurers, I think the best way to think about this is, okay, we're going to the internet of money.
Speaker: We're looking at a different store of value that is digital.
Speaker: And how will that help me with my working capital?
Speaker: And if I've got better transparency,
Speaker: workflow or programmability and audit trail of monies as they move through these different channels, then what are the decisions that I can make as a treasurer?
Speaker: How can I help speed up my working capital as a result of moving towards these new forms of digital monies?
Speaker: And so I think there's some really interesting points there.
Speaker: And then if you look at specifically around CBDCs and some of the developments that are happening across the globe, some of them are theoretical, but some of them are actually happening today.
Speaker: So if you look at some of the Western corporates that operate in China, they've been told that they need to accept digital yuan at point of sale.
Speaker: So all of a sudden, now they have this new form of currency that they need to store on their balance sheet, they need to accept, and they need to think about, well, how am I going to handle this new form of currency?
Speaker: So there will be systems that need to be updated.
Speaker: There will be embracing some of these newer technologies.
Speaker: So distributed ledger technology as an example.
Speaker: And to be fair, we see that digital ledger technology is being adopted by a lot of our corporates, whether it's in their supply chains, whether it's looking at trade, whether it's looking at how they do payments as well.
Speaker: And similarly for HSBC,
Speaker: With distributed ledger technology, we're able to tokenize different digital assets.
Speaker: We're able to store them in digital vaults.
Speaker: We're able to do cross-border payments and confirmation of our internal payments between different systems.
Speaker: And also, we've got another solution, which is called Trigger Chain, where we're able to trigger payments from these new DLT ecosystems and connect them to traditional payment rails.
Speaker: So I think there is an element of how can treasurers prepare, be aware of what's going on in the marketplace, partner with banks that understand this space like HSBC and look at how we can partner together to ensure that we get the right sort of outcomes by adopting these new technologies and transitioning from heritage to digital.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: It's very much coming down the line and preparing ahead.
Speaker: Always, always welcome.
Speaker: So, guys, we've covered quite a lot of ground today, even though we've at the same time only scratched the surface because there's so much to say.
Speaker: And I think we could do a podcast that lasted at least a couple of days on all of this.
Speaker: So I'm wondering what your key takeaways or action points are for our listeners out of this.
Speaker: James, can I come to you first?
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: My big advice at the moment is to keep learning.
Speaker: I mean, so much is changing on a day to day basis.
Speaker: So in this whole subject, you know, new central banks are starting their own research schemes.
Speaker: The central banks are involved, coming up new ideas, new conclusions are being come to new ideas, a thought about how they could affect the economy.
Speaker: So just be alert and keep sort of keep on top of what's happening because so much is changing all the time.
Speaker: And it's a topic that's not going to go away anytime soon and is only going to get more important.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Mark, your final thoughts?
Speaker: My final thoughts, how we move or how we transition from heritage to digital is going to be absolutely key and it's better together.
Speaker: So if we're working together in different working groups and consortia and partnerships and we're able to help shape the outcomes that we would like to shape as central bank digital currencies come online, then I think that's going to be key for whether we're going to be successful or not.
Speaker: And as James said, there's new stories every single day.
Speaker: that's coming out whether it's CBDCs, stable coins, crypto guarantees or tokenization there's lots of really interesting stuff going on.
Speaker: Yeah well this is what's been great about having you both here today is that all of our listeners can't always keep up with everything so you've given us an absolutely amazing overview of what's going on and what's important to pay attention to so thank you both ever so much for joining us today.
Speaker: This has been HSBC's Cyboss Spotlight, a podcast mini-series produced especially by TMI for HSBC Global Viewpoint.
Speaker: To discover other episodes in this series, head to HSBC's Globe at treasury-4-0.com or search for HSBC Global Viewpoint on Apple and Spotify.
Speaker: And to find out more about HSBC's presence at Cyboss, visit gbm.hsbc.com forward slash cyboss.
Speaker: Thank you for listening today.
Speaker: This has been HSBC Global Viewpoint Banking and Markets.
Speaker: For more information about anything you heard in this podcast or to learn about HSBC's global services and offerings, please visit gbm.hsbc.com.
